Consider the Atlantic sturgeon, scientific name asapenzer oxyrhynchus.
It's one big fish, a prehistoric wonder.
Its ancestors swam in the waters of Pangaea more than 200 million years ago.
An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but not the Atlantic sturgeon.
They kept on swimming.
Sturgeons are bottom feeders, probing for small prey with barbells that look like mustaches.
It's a bony fish covered not in scales but in rigid plates known as scutes.
Imagine an ankylosaur, or a turtle, for that matter.
And they live long time.
If we let them, 50 to 60 years is normal.
100 is not unusual, which means atlantic sturgeons grow to enormous sizes.
300 pounds is common, but theyve been caught weighing up to 800 pounds.
Occasionally, they propel their enormous bodies out of the water, catch mad air, and smack noisily back into the depths.
Why did they do it?
No one knows.
But given the size of the fish, their ecstatic flights can be dangerous to unsuspecting rivergoers.
The Atlantic sturgeon.
A deadly surprise, but not as deadly to us as we are to the sturgeons.
Once upon a time, there were more atlantic sturgeons in Virginia's James river than anyone knew what to do with.
During the bad winter of 1609, known as the starving time, the Jamestown colonists were forced to eat whatever they could, including snakes, rats, cats, dogs, their horses, and one another.